A Weak of improvements

Yes, I know how to spell. Yes, it was done intentionally.

Once again not a whole lot was accomplished this week. I did finally manage to get a nice enough day Sunday to cut the hardwood floor transitions. My neighbors repeatedly asked why I did this- I pointed out the 'quality' ones you get at HD were 20$ for 3'11" of wood, that the finish wasn't high gloss, that I'd require 4x of these and there'd be a total of 5 seams, and that (frankly) I hated the way all of them looked.

So I cut my own.

It's a simple pattern- a 15-20 degree angle up to a little less than half, a small steep nub down on the other side, and a recessed channel for the carpeting under the nub. I then take runner boards and put them down on the floor, nail them in place, then nail thru the new transition into them. Add a bit of glue first for security (where possible) and these babies aren't going anywhere. I haven't decided if I'll use the Stainless Steel Screws on them or just nail them in place- not that anyone would know the proper view anyway. They are a bit thicker than usual but since I'm hiding the fact I ripped out a wall and I want it to look like a little nook to go work in front of a window, I figure they'll police a roller chair quite nicely.

The furniture in the babies room was evacuated to my inlaws, against my wishes. I thought I'd said repeatedly to leave it here as I really don't want to have to call anyone for measurements- in fact, I was going to put one of the dressers in our bedroom behind a door, but my wife surprised me after I told her 5x this week, including yesterday, by having one of my friends show up with his car to load the furniture up.

I'm also arranging an 'inspection' of the house by a number of my neighbors and friends that have had children. I'll give them each a clipboard and tell them to goto town, finding all of the problems they can see. I figure that'll give us a nice list to work from to go do improvements instead of sitting on the sofa watching movies. I mean, we are having a kid, right- no more free time; might as well get used to it now. That includes picking up every little piece of junk that drops to the ground.

I also made the mistake of showing my neighbors kids how to pop a wheelie on their bike- I was afraid they were doing it wrong and might hurt themselves (kept flipping the bike over). I'm now their new best friend- the one comes over and bangs the door, bangs the doorbell, opens the door.... ach, oh well. No harm.

Garage is slightly more re-organized now. I can get in and out- got rid of some more stuff, put a microwave off the floor and onto the generator- we're getting there. Still don't have the pulls for the drawers built- they're just sitting in there- and I haven't run any dust collection hose yet (growl). Need to get that built ASAP.

So much work...

RIP, Harvey William Stoll

Today my Grandfather, the man who taught me most about home improvements, wiring, woodworking (with my father), who built hoochie sticks, showed me scouting, took me on hikes, how to find blueberry bushes in the wild, to pick the cherries off of his trees in the back yard, how NOT to put rocks in the springs in the garage, passed away.

He was very ill and very much in pain. Now he's not.

Den & Panoramics

I finally managed to get the den carpeting cut up in order to install the new hardwood floor. There's still quite a bit of work to be done in order to get it ready but I think I'll have to delay that until later- I need to construct the floor transition pieces our of 3" hardwood and attach them. That means rounding wood ... which means somehow setting up the router. I spent most of the day cleaning up the garage in hopes that I could do this quickly and efficiently (everyone laugh now)

As for panoramics I've been knocking them out as I go. Having a bit of trouble with the tools- all the new ones 'disappear' as soon as edited- and without that thumbnail I've got to manually load them all.
Can you see the annoying curvature in the horizon? Sheesh. You'd think there'd be a simple tool to just click the parts you want 'flattened'.
Photo is an IR image from a modified 300D Canon Rebel and is 35 frames. The Rebel has a buffer of 4 shots and writes slower than a kid sending a thank you card. This was a LONG photo...

Finally Home

Flying has become such a pain in the ass now adays I don't know why I even bother. It's not for the per-diem. It's not for the exotic locations.

This trip involved pushing back from the gate and THEN being told there was a ground stop in SFA. That meant 1.5 hours with a warm plane, lots of water, and no air. Which meant the 1.75 hour connection now was 5 minutes long.

The second plane, same issues- late. 15 minutes to make a connection from C to F concourse in Chicago (about 1 mile if I know how long it took me to walk).

And when I arrived home my house was exactly as I'd left it- even the ties I left on the sofa were easily found.

Of course I spent most of today going off and throwing crap out because, frankly, if it's got to be cleaned it looks like I'm going to be the one who has to do it all. So my new solution is to simply throw everything out.

Want some crap?

Food in Reno: Day 3

Reno, NV. Lots of Breweries. Lots of beer. Lots of good food. Day 3.

Today we snuck out for lunch to B&J's Brewery- 13999 South Virginia, Reno NV (Summit Mall). Walking into the place was overwhelming- it was one of the nicest laid out restaurants I've been in. Everything practically gleamed- and looked brand new. I was told they'd been open for about 2 years so they must really take care of their equipment (or replace it monthly). Hardwood floors were in great shape, too- no obvious discolorations on the white wood (implying no spills ;P)

They offered a sampler of 7 beers for fairly cheap and would substitute, but today they were out of their cask conditioned ale. Included in the presentation was a handy dandy (see photos) chart with the beers and a great description of everything about them. Scores to follow.

I ordered the Melt- and it was delicious. Cooked to perfection the garlic and rosemary sourdough bread crust was crisp and dry as it hid the caramelized onion and two cheeses beneath it. I couldn't stop eating it- in between samples of beers- and snatched huge quarter cut french fries like there was no tomorrow.

This place gets a 10/10 for service, food, and beer. Did I mention I learned about it by overhearing one of it's employees while at Great Sinkhole, errr Great Basin?

Blonde: 2/5/4. Just not a fan of Blondes...

Heff: 3/6/6. Fairly exploding with floral aroma the finish was great, for a heff, but again just not my beer.

Pirahnna Pale Ale: 3/9/9. Excellent Hops with a nice complex mixture (or at least no overwhelming one type). Flavor was excellent and bitterness was spot on. Could drink another one or 5.

Jeremiah's Red: 2/7/7. Nice soft malt finish with a good sense of floral hops. Bitterness could be a bit more, but don't let that distract you from this great beer.

Nutty Brewnette: 2/6/6. I wish it had had some bittering malt in it- but that's not the mark of a good nut brown. Was very well received by several members of the table.

Porter: 2/7/9. Great porter- excellent head (N2/CO2) and even better retention. This head slid down the glass the entire time I was sampling beres.

Stout: 2/8/7. The stout was excellent but the finish was weak- it should be lower but I just can't bring myself to nail it for finishing sweet. Drop the SG by another 1/4 point or so and it'll be perfect. Great head as well and excellent aroma.

Food in Reno: Day 2

Reno, NV. Lots of Breweries. Lots of beer. Lots of good food. Day 2.

Day 2 finds us at Great Basin Brewery, located at 846 Victorian Ave. The entire area is packed with food joints so Great Basin Brewery must have something special to attract attention.

It doesn't.

Now usually I can find a couple of great things to say about a place, so I will here too. There's free parking in the back in a garage, the beer is served cold and not over/under carbonated, and the lighting is great.

The food, on the other hand...

I had one of the more expensive items on the menu- a $17, 14oz (hah) "pepper encrusted rib eye". It was more along the lines of pepper dusted, and while I was very happy that it was cooked to perfection it quickly became a game of 'find the steak in the fat'. I don't get rib eye's from the supermarket with that much fat. This one was less than 3/4" thick- looking like it had been pounded to achieve that feat. The potatoes were excellent though.

My coworker had chicken shishkabobs. He remarked on their lack of ... ingenuity... when devising them. Chicken, green pepper, chicken, onion, repeat. Thats it. In a part of the country where practically EVERYTHING has colour, you can't do better than that? Can't even mix in some yellow/red peppers? How's about some mushrooms? Or onions bigger than 3 layers thick, sadly clinging to the chicken in a desperate attempt to flavour them.

Lastly, since this is a brewery, I should mention the beer. The beer was fairly good, if you didn't mind waiting over 25 minutes for the first waitress to come up to order one. Then to subsequently have to ARGUE with said waitress over the cost of a sampler pack (they don't do samplers, you can 'buy' 12 samplers for $12!!!!). When said samplers arrive you have to rely on the obviously busy waitress's memory to hope you get the right ones- they don't even provide a tearaway sheet for notes. I thought Silver Peak's was expensive from the night before- boy was I wrong.

The Icky (named after a fossil) was a strongly hoppy beer with an excellent finish- if you love cascade. There seemed to be quite a bit of that one particular hop in there with no other flavours- and if there were other hops they were simply overwhelmed. A score of 3/7/7

The Vienna Lager (At least thats what I think she brought me) was quite smoky and Delicious- it gets a 2/7/8 Score- very pleasant.

The Truckee Red had an excellently clean finish- could have used a bit more floral hops- and the malt wasn't overpowering at all. Score 2/8/7

Lastly she delivered a 'Boont Amber' guest beer from ?Anderson Valley?. Note the question marks and the quotes- I have no idea what I really was given and even though I asked her to repeat it 3x I still don't know. Score of 2/6/8

Overall the price for the meal was cheap but so was everything else. Good outdoor seating, lots of space, but just skip it unless you're coming in on "Tightwad" Tuesdays where beer is 2.50$ a pint.

On an aside, I overheard a conversation about another brewery south of town called "BJ's". Think I'm going to hit that in the next two days before I leave.

Beer Ratings

Since I'm going to talk about beer alot I ought to post a ratings.

There are 3 numbers- I stole this from my wine courses.

The first number: Aroma. How much I like, how much I can sense, the 'nose' of the beer. Score is 0-3. Even water can get a 1.... so if you see a 0 there must be a problem.

The second number: Taste. This is the 'mouth feel' of the beer. How does it sit- does it burn, is it pleasurable, does it hit the right nerves- literally how delicious is it? Score is 0-10.

The third number: Finish. How does the beer go down? Is it floral? Hoppy? Metallic (over hopped with Cascade can cause this). Do the little beer bubbles make themselves known as the beer disappears down your gullet? Can you continue to drink this beer? Score is 0-10.

All important questions that must be known. And yes, I get mocked for writing down numbers.. .but it's worth it.

Food in Reno: Day 1

Reno, NV- Lots of beer, lots of food- and all I have is a camera with 3 days to find out whats good and not.

A year ago we visited a restaurant called Silver Peak. Met the head brewer there- Trent- and he spent some time sitting down with us talking about his beers. I told him I was in love with the Porter they had by far- turned out it was his particular beer that he made his way. When you've got a good one, everyone beats a path to your keg...

This time we went to the original Silver Peak Brewery, located at 124 Wonder Street, Reno NV.

They have a sampler there which, for the cost of 8.75, can be yours. The one we received had Red Roadster, XXX Blonde Ale, Baileywheat Hefeweizen, Sierra Amber Ale, Peavine Porter, Silver Peak India Pale Ale, and three specialties- Sunset Raspberry, Honey Ale, and Kolsch Ale.
The samplers weren't over filled so they didn't spill or contaminate (you'd be surprised) and were served in a stainless tray with accompanying documentation. Of course, a pair of ours were out of order but it's fairly easy to recognize the differences between a Pale Ale and a Porter :)

Red Roaster: Excellent hops but too much malt/unfermented sugars. Far too sweet to drink more than a sip- 2/8/10 (based on a sip. Based on an entire glass that 10 falls to a 2/8/4)

XXX Blond Ale: Not a fan, but that's me. 1/4/5
BaileyWheat Hefeweizen: A good Hef, if only I drank it more. Got very spoiled in Germany... so the low scores: 1/5/7

Sierra Amber Ale: Excellent taste with mild malts and good hops to finish. 2/5/7

Peavine Porter. When I had this last I don't remember it being so ... limp. Maybe it was a bad pour from the bottom of a keg, maybe it was just a low pressure day, but this beer needed more head than it was served in. 2/7/4 - and I LOVED it the last time I had it. Great coffee and bitterness to round out everything.

Silver PEak India Pale Ale: Extra hoppy but not overwhelming with a massive burst of one type of 'alpha acid rules' hops. Great nose- and even better finish. I wish I'd ordered a pint of this over the roadster- 3/8/9

Sunset Raspberry- Specialty beer. Skip it- you'll burn your taste buds. In fact, cut it with the Hef or the Blond, but served as it is it'll strip the flavour centers of your brain to their bare wires. I didn't even score it.

Honey Ale: Great flavor, not overpowered by the honey. Little more hops to give it some bite and it would be perfect, IMHO. 2/6/4 (for finish was lacking aroma hops)

Kolsch Ale: Great tasting all the way. Can't get much better than this in the US I'd imagine. 2/8/8
As for the food- Delicious. I had Rosemary flatbread with roasted garlic + brie. The brie I wish had been spread out a bit but that would have ruined the aesthetics of the dish, I'm sure. the main meal was the Brewers burger- undercooked slightly (I ordered medium, got medium rare) but they hit my double cheese with no problems.





Wait staff was attentive and quick on responses. Can't go wrong there.
This was the original Silver Peak and it's quality is excellent- Thanks for a great evening!

Weddings and Washers

Yesterday was a friend of Liz's wedding- Sean. Sean and I had met once or twice but we really had nothing in common so I never went out of my way to see if there were updates in his life.

Well, a wedding counts as a major update, and so we went to theirs yesterday. The ceremony started 30 minutes late but was very fast- and then it was drinks and food. Alot of drinks. And alot of new people I'd never met (obviously).

Well, one thing leads to another and we're all out on the dance floor feeding the bride and groom drinks- and somehow I got the nickname of 'hazer' from her. Oh well, it was worth it. Sean was bombed by the end of the night- he has got to be hurting today (as well as I do). I stuck to Chard for most of the evening.... which leads us to....

Washing machines. Liz comes up this morning to tell me that she did a load of delicate last week and forgot about it- I immediately envision a rusted pitted tank. She just says it won't spin.

That sounds suspiciously like the LAST time the damn washer stopped working- the switch went. Getting the f-ing washer apart is a pain in the ass and I don't know why I even wanted to do it again, but again I must because the switch shows no electrical conductivity. I'm going to put it back together without a switch so she can do laundry, or I might just leave it apart- don't know yet given how bloody difficult it is to work on.

We'll see if the OEM will give me a new switch for free- 1.5 years on an item is a bit on the short side, ya know?

A few more days after a baby girl announcement

Every conversation has become gender- specific now. The baby girl. My baby girl. Our baby girl. It's cute. All pronouns, amateur as they are, are now feminine case.

Even so it's still not real- even as I see the swelling belly. I guess feeling the child kick will do it- maybe- before the girl shows up.

I've already decided to buy a new house- something much larger- and I can start the refinishing. I don't really want to support two mortgages and a kid at the same time but I know no other way of doing it. Best deals are in the summer- we're out- so unless I get lucky soon....

More remodeling. I've thrown the cabinets that were taking up so much space in the garage outside until my neighbor takes them (or I toss them to the street and burn them). That opened alot of space. I want to repair Liz's bike so she can go riding with me but I still don't have enough space to do so.

Upcoming: a review of my wireless radio slaves. If I clean out the den maybe I can put the studio here...

Gender No Longer Neutral Description of the baby

There's been two schools of thought on our child. One is that Mom's cravings of fresh fruit (Where did the 2 lbs of strawberries go, Honey?) would imply a girl. The other, Karma implied I need someone more stubborn than me.

Strawberries won. We're having a little girl.

I thought so initially when there was a brief moment and I noticed a lack of hardware as they scanned past the baby's legs. Given how stubborn this kid was being towards being imaged it took almost 40 minutes to get into a position that the sonogram could show something.

Therefore, most likely, it's a girl.

No bigger brother to knock down the barriers for her first- this will be a new experience for both of us as we're both from families where the son was born first.

Great States Reel Mower

Today I bought a push mower. This is different from my radial, gas powered push mower by the simple fact that there is no engine.

At first it was a little odd getting used to- the handles are much shorter than someone that's 6'2" tall can call comfortable, but once I got past the cramping in the hands I was able to bang thru the yard with very little difficulty. Grass flew off the back of it as if I were watching a cartoon- literally cascading in a parabolic arc off the cutting surfaces.

Maybe I chomped it a bit short.

The mower cost me 40$, it retails for 90$. The gentleman I bought it from advertised it as "I bought this, pushed it 10 feet, and realized I was too lazy to use it". It looks in great shape with some very minor rust spots. There's a significant amount of rubbing on the bar but I'll download the manual and see what that takes. Contrary to expectations it isn't 'quiet' but loud enough to hear and would probably not make phone conversation easy- if you could get past the pantings.

I figure I'll have to cut the grass 2x a week now with this, but I won't be using any gas in the lawnmower- about 2-3 yards = 1 tank of gas, 6 tanks per fillup, meaning I'll save about 1.50$ per time I cut my grass.

You may find this hard to believe but a single TWIG can jam the blades- which means come fall and leaf season the lawnmower is coming out again to mulch mulch mulch.

One thing I especially like about this is all the grass cuttings are neatly distributed across the yard instead of compacted under the right wheel as in my mulching lawnmower. Overall a great product.

Great States Reel Mower, Deluxe 18" version

Love the Neighbors

Today, while my wife was away, the neighbors all came over to give the downstairs a 'once over'. Mind you I spent most of the morning trying to track and exterminate a *#)($#8$# chipmunk that had somehow gotten into the house. And boy did they (the neighbors) lay in to all the things that had to go.

What stunk was I *KNOW* all this. I can't, however, do it myself. Usually it involves pitching craploads of stuff and junk- we have 3 shelves of cookbooks. What do we eat each week? Same thing. 'Nuff said.

Anyway They simply reiterated what I already knew: that pretty much everything downstairs has to go. That there was never going to be any more time to do anything. I acknowledge that and understand it, intellectually, from watching one of them 'ride herd' on the kids. That I can handle. I think.

And go it shall. I'm not going to lose my baby because a bloody bookrack fell on it... or it choked on some yarn... or it found a needle or coaster or frankly anything.

(Oh yeah, I hate dusting).

Hooray for the Fourth of July

We went to watch fireworks with the neighbors last night- had a blast, no pun intended. Lots of photos were taken of the air bursting shells. Music was rather poor but you can only have so many speakers I suppose. Greece does a pretty good job for that but a very poor job for crowd control.

WD10EAVS 1tb Western Digital "Green Power" Hard Drive

Yes, I know this reads like an advertisement but in a sense it is. I bought (back when it was a great deal) a 750gb WD Green power drive for 135$. A *steal* at that price.
Then suddenly 2 months later Buy.com offered a 25$ off coupon and a 1 tb green power drive (WD10EACS) for 187-25 + free shipping. A *STEAL* at that price. Since the green power drives spin so slow (5400 RPM) and are ultra quiet they make perfect HTPC drives. Now a couple of hundred movies later and things start to get interesting and you need more space, so you start looking for a new drive...
Which brings us to the WD10EAVS. This drive doesn't officially exist on Western Digital's website and, prior to my purchase, I had no idea what its specs would be. I had seen them listed on a few pages talking about MyBook external USB/Firewire devices, but for the most part these drives were just a big unknown. And so at 179.99, free shipping and a 35% rebate (Thanks Microsoft!) a 1tb drive could be had for 117$- a tremendous steal. Lots of stealing going on.
Unfortunately when the drive arrived it had NO WD warranty - I've contacted the ebay seller about that little tidbit- so this might become a very expensive lesson.
Fortunately I was able to plop the drive into my C2D system and run a quick pair of benchmarks on it- the sustained bandwidth transfer is incredible for this drive- starts at well over 100mb/sec and drops to a paltry 40mb/sec- but in either case this is STILL fast enough to record video with. I'm in LOVE. A little history- I currently capture on a pair of Maxtor 320gb HDs in RAID-0 running on a dedicated hardware raid card, PCIE-4x. The new C2D board I bought didn't have a dedicated 4X slot like the AMD 760 chipset I came from, so I had to settle for significantly degraded video performance. That meant disabling my 16x PCIE graphics card (passive cooled for noise) and castrating it- by telling the system that it should run both PCIE 16x slots as 2x 8x slots. Very annoying. Even then the RAID-0 is capable of capturing at 140mb/sec all the way out to 50%, and even then it only falls to 80mb/sec at the very end. MORE than fast enough to capture standard and HD video (for now).
The RAID-5 (dedicated card) is a bit slower, as you'd expect, and is built upon 4x WD5000AAKS system. These drives were pretty expensive at the time but, again, worth it. I was moving upwards from 4x 200gb Seagate RAID 5 system and I needed to expand. Digital photography and digital video consume tremendous amounts of space. I think at this point I may replace all 4 drives with 1tb as soon as the price comes down and continue to rotate them in and out for backup purposes, which leads me to dispose of my 200gb PATA drives for something other than a pittance.
Now, back to the real reason I bought the 1tb WD10EAVS drive- I needed to add more space to the media box that my gorgeous wife likes to watch. I found a live-cd called 'clonezilla' - and it was everything they said it was. Not only did it clone the 3.2gb partition of the main boot disk (I was running an old 7200 RPM WD drive that sounded like a muffled screeching vacuum) but it repaired GRUB and modified LILO/bootloader to work correctly. And it did it in less than 20 minutes- all I had to do was type 'yes' 2x for every question. Talk about working correctly... this baby is DEFINITELY going into my emergency supply kit. So what's all this got to do with a baby and being a new daddy? Well, I put the first disk on there- Baby Einstein. Heh :) That and a few hundred hours of music....

Partying with the Neighbors

Today, being the Fourth of July, is our neighborhood get-together. It's more closely related to someone buys beer, someone else drinks said beer while grilling, other people buy cheese platters, and we all pile into cars to go watch fireworks.

Most of this morning was spent outside watching kids run around and play.

The neighbors little 4 year old asked why I had a bike in my shed instead of the garage. I told him it was because I broke it. Since he was being a turd (parents words, not mine) I went on with "In fact, I ran over a little kid with it and it broke. A little kid just about your size, with black hair".

His response? "You should have slowed down".

Ya can't win ;)

Addicted to WheresGeorge

I have more minions.

WheresGeorge.com is a website in which you can 'track' where a dollar spent ends up. It relies on users and regular people to enter a bill when they find it- usually with a bright stamp on it- and can calculate the locations based upon the zip code that the user provides.

Most bills end up locally- as you'd expect, and some show up in weird places (like Cape Town, South Africa).

Where do they go? They follow lines of commerce- I've found that 20$ bills go directly to the bank and almost inevitably show up in ATMs some place else (Ohio is popular from NY).

Interesting, no?